generations. During the 16th century, when the surging impulses of the Renaissance had died away, the armoire relapsed into plainness, its proportions increased, and it was again constructed in one piece. Ere long, however, it grew more sumptuous than ever. Boulle encrusted it with marqueterie from designs by Bérain; it glowed with amorini, with the torches and arrows of Cupid, with the garlands which he weaves for his captives, and when allusiveness left a corner vacant, it was filled with arabesques in ebony or ivory, in brass or white metal. While the royal palaces and the hôtels of the great nobility were filled with those costly splendours, the ordinary cabinetmaker continued to construct his modest pieces, and by the middle of the 18th century the armoire was found in every French house, ample in width and high in proportion to the lofty rooms of the period. It is not to be supposed that so useful a piece of furniture was confined to France. It was used, more or less, throughout a considerable part of Europe, but it was distinctively Gallic nevertheless, and never became thoroughly acclimatized elsewhere until about the beginning of the 19th century, when it developed into the glass-fronted wardrobe which is now an essential detail in the plenishing of the bed-chamber, not merely in France and England, but in many other countries. The armoire à glace was known and occasionally made in France as far back as the middle of the 18th century, and almost the earliest mention of it connects it with the scandalous relations of the Maréchal de Richelieu and the beautiful fermière générale, Mme de la Popelinière, who had one made to mask a secret door. In the conventional and not very attractive wardrobe of commerce it is difficult to descry the gracious characteristics of the armoire of the Renaissance or the 17th century, and it is not altogether surprising that Théodore de Banville should have condemned one of the most solidly useful of household necessaries as a “hideous monster.”
ARMORICA (Aremorica), the Roman name, derived from two Celtic words meaning the “seaside” (ar, on, and mor, sea), for the land of the Armorici, roughly the peninsula of Brittany. At the time of the Roman advance on Gaul there were five principal tribes in Armorica, the Namneti, the Veneti, the Osismii, the Curiosolitae and the Redones. It was subdued by Caesar, who entirely destroyed the seafaring tribe of its south coast, the Veneti. Under the Empire it formed part of the province of Gallia Lugudunensis (Lugdunensis). It contained hardly any towns, though many large country houses, and was perhaps less Romanized than the rest of Gaul. In and after the later part of the 5th century it received many Celtic immigrants from the British Isles, fleeing (it is said) from the Saxons; and the Celtic dialect which the Bretons still speak is thought to owe its origin to these immigrants. (See further Brittany.)
ARMOUR, PHILIP DANFORTH (1832–1901), American merchant and philanthropist, was born in Stockbridge, New York, on the 16th of May 1832. He was educated at Cazenovia Academy, Cazenovia, N.Y., worked for several years on his father’s farm, and in 1852 with a small party went overland to California, a large part of the journey being made on foot. Here during the next four years he laid the foundations of his fortune. In 1856 he became associated with his friend, Frederick S. Miles, in a wholesale grocery and commission business at Milwaukee. In 1863 he became the head of the firm of Armour, Plankington & Co., pork packers, whose headquarters were at Milwaukee. He also obtained a large interest in the firm H. O. Armour & Co., which was founded by his brother, Herman Ossian Armour (1837–1901), and which, starting as a grain commission business, in 1868 established also a large pork-packing plant. Of this firm, the name of which was changed to Armour & Co. in 1870, he became the head in 1875, and thereafter the business made such rapid progress that in 1901 as many as 11,000 hands were employed. Besides contributing to many charitable enterprises, Armour founded the Armour Institute of Technology at Chicago in 1892 and the Armour Flats in Chicago, built for the purpose of supplying at a low rental good homes for working men and their families. He also contributed liberally to the Armour Mission in Chicago, which was founded in 1881 by his brother, Joseph Armour. At the time of his death, on the 6th of January 1901, Philip D. Armour’s private fortune was supposed to exceed $50,000,000.
ARMOUR PLATES. The earliest recorded proposal to employ armour for ships of war (for body armour, &c., see Arms and Armour) appears to have been made in England by Sir William Congreve in 1805. In The Times of the 20th of February of that year reference is made to Congreve’s designs Defence
for ships.for an armoured, floating mortar battery which the inventor considered would be proof against artillery fire. Among Congreve’s unpublished papers there is also a suggestion for armour-plating the embrasures of casemates. Nothing, however, seems to have come of these proposals, and a similar lack of appreciation befell the next advocate of armour, John Stevens of New Jersey, U.S.A., who submitted the plans of an armoured vessel to Congress in 1812. The Stevens family, however, continued to work at the subject, and by 1841 had determined by actual experiment the thickness of wrought-iron armour which was proof against the projectiles then in use. The necessity for armouring ships as a protection against shell fire was again History.pointed out by General Paixhans in 1841, and in 1845 Dupuy de Lôme had prepared the designs of an armoured frigate for the French government. During the period between 1827 and 1854, experiments in connexion with the proposed application of armour to both ships and forts were carried out in England, the United States and France, but the question did not get beyond the experimental stage until the latter year, when armoured floating batteries were laid down in all three countries, probably as the immediate outcome of the destruction of the Turkish fleet by shell fire at Sinope on the 30th of November 1853.
Three of the French floating batteries were in action at the bombardment of Kinburn in 1855, where they achieved a conspicuous success, silencing the Russian forts after a four hours’ engagement, during which they themselves, although frequently struck, were practically uninjured, their loss in personnel being but trifling. To quote Very: “This comparatively insignificant action, which had little if any effect upon the course of the Crimean War, changed the whole condition of armour for naval use from one of speculation to one of actual and constant necessity.” The military application of armour for the protection of guns mounted in permanent fortifications followed. Its development, however, took rather a different course, and the question of armour generally is of less importance for the military engineer than for the naval constructor. For the employment of armour in ship construction and in permanent works on land, see the articles Shipbuilding; Fortification and Siegecraft; the present article is concerned solely with the actual armour itself.
The earliest armour, both for ships and forts, was made of wrought iron, and was disposed either in a single thickness or in successive layers sandwiched with wood or concrete. Such armour is now wholly obsolete, though examples of it may still be found in a few forts of early date. The chief application of armour in modern land Construction and testing.defences is in the form of shields for the protection of guns mounted en barbette. Examples of such shields are shown in figs. 1 and 2. Fig. 1 shows a 4·5-in. steel shield for the U.S.A. government, face-hardened by the Harvey process, to which reference is made below. It was attacked by 5-in. and 6-in. armour-piercing shot, and proved capable of keeping out the 5-in. up to a striking velocity of nearly 1800 ft. per second, but was defeated by a 6-in. capped A.P. shot with a striking velocity of 1842 ft. per second. The mounting was not seriously damaged by the firing, but could be operated after the impact of one 3·2-in., five 5-in. and three 6-in. projectiles. Fig. 2 shows a gun-shield, manufactured by Messrs Hadfield of Sheffield, after attack by 4·1-in., 4·7-in. and 6-in. armour-piercing and other projectiles. The limit of the shield’s resistance was just reached by an uncapped 4·7-in. A.P. shell with a striking velocity of 2128 ft. per second. The shield (the average maximum thickness of which was 5·8 in.) showed great toughness, and although subjected to a
